| ▲ | mrtksn 9 hours ago |
| At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control? You are just moving the verification point to another gate, it means that no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet because we want to allow parents to control their kids. You want to use your friends Wi-Fi? Now that requires full identification so that we know that its not some kid trying to look at stuff their parents don't allow. Want to connect your cat toilet to the internet? Well, we will need to either cryptographically identify the device or attach its ID to your real ID because we don't want to allow kids look at stuff their parents did not allow and this might just be a proxy device for some nerdy 14 y/o. Want to use your old PC? Sorry that's not possible, now all devices that connect to the internet require biometric identification because we can't tell if this is an adult or just some kid using a legacy device to look at stuff their parents don't allow. |
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| ▲ | RandomGerm4n 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The answer is quite simple. You just don't verify it. The point isn’t to verify the age but to set the age on the device itself. If the parents set the age on the cell phone or computer, that setting is then used as the basis. The operating systems can be configured so that only the device administrator can change the age. Systemd already has a field for storing the age, which programs can read. If the child doesn’t know the root password for the laptop, they can’t change the age. If they do manage to get around that, well, so be it. The solution doesn’t have to be perfect because it would still be an improvement over the current situation without restricting adults in any way. |
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| ▲ | izend 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are you a parent? I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access. I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents. My daughter's school actually advised parents to not enable parental controls on her ChromeBook because it would interfere with the school's education websites but my daughter was caught playing web games in class so we decided to lock her down anyways. | | |
| ▲ | ingvay7 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Cross-platform support is very poor (iOS/Android/Windows/Mac)if ur trying to use family link. After trying to make FL work for weeks, i moved to another service that has morel granular features than FL and detailed activity reports with web filtering rules but its paid but it atleast works instead of those unusable knobs on FL. | |
| ▲ | fn-mote 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > my daughter was caught playing web games in class Hilarious to me. The biggest game of whack-a-mole ever. I would love to know if this lockdown was successful (and if so, how it worked). In my city, there is a district that is so “locked down” that the images from Wikipedia don’t even load. But guess what? Kids still find ways to play games. | | |
| ▲ | saltcured 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Of course, that whack-a-mole is an intrinsic part youth and adolescence too. I think back to my mostly analogue school days. We found ways to disobey and amuse ourselves in the classroom. Imagine pusing for locked down paper so kids can't pass notes nor make spit-wads and airplanes. Or locked down pens to prevent tic-tac-toe, doodling, lewd drawings, or scrawling graffiti on those old desks. Some kind of KYC rules so that the older kids at school cannot pass their broader understanding of the world and cussing vocabulary down to the impressionable younger kids. Age restrictions on the trail to the woods, where kids somehow always knew about that stash of dirty magazines... | |
| ▲ | sellmesoap 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I liken this process to a losing game played by authoritarians all over, normalizing a game of "subvert the man" I see the battle fought over sex, drugs, piracy, probably many other topics. Take drugs (for example) "drugs are bad m'kay" but then there are mind expanding opportunities tucked in there as well, yes most have some risk or delayed consequences associated but the lack of nuance (hard to impart on young minds granted) leads to the drugs are bad talk from someone authoritive, and those that dabble bring amazing tales that refute the earlier information that drugs are bad, and survivorship bias and a "new way the authorities were wrong" takes over and undermines the good intentions of those that see the negative impact drugs can bring. Chances are kids seeking a less locked down experience may dabble in much darker places on the net and it may be that this new "KYC" push actually widens that devide instead of protecting the children (which is merely the story used to push for this enhanced customer identity goldmine.) |
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| ▲ | jvvw 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I do feel that if there were actually decent parental controls on the most used systems out there then we might not have got to this point in the first place! It is either a nightmare or impossible to set any sort of sensible controls on internet and social media access for children and teenagers. | |
| ▲ | eli 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is the improved iOS parental controls. When they shipped it (and for years afterward) it simply did not work https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apples-parental-contr... It really is surprising given Apple's reputation for UX and safety. | |
| ▲ | hamper653 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why does your daughter have a Chromebook in the first place? | | | |
| ▲ | miohtama 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Being parent is not supposed to be easy | | | |
| ▲ | tempfile 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Parental controls on devices are not hard because they are intrinsically hard. The companies just do not care about them, because nobody has forced them to be implemented sensibly. There is absolutely zero reason an Android device could not have a shiny button saying "Kid's device" when you set it up and never need configuring again. So this is not a criticism of the approach, and only a criticism of the companies. | |
| ▲ | aceazzameen 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | 1718627440 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No, the point was that the actual decision happens client side and under the control of the sysadmin (the parent). > You are just moving the verification point to another gate Yeah, the gate being the decision of legal entities of age, aka. adults. > You want to use your friends, Wi-Fi? That would still do whatever your parent decided for you. > Want to connect your can toilet to the internet? Whether the toilet can connect to the network, is the decision of the network administrator, and toilets don't contain UAs, so that wouldn't even have software on them, where you could configure such behaviour. |
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| ▲ | trollbridge 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are definitely toilets that have UAs. | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're making the mistake of assuming that every kid has access to identified device and that device is under parent control. You can't make this assumption because that's not true. It might be true for some middle class helicopter parents that have iPhones and time to manage and keep it under strict control but there are non-middle class kids out there who just use whatever device they can get their hands on and their parens neither have time nor ability to control that. | | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How many children, actually have the money to buy themself another smartphone, or get a smartphone gifted by random people? I bet that's very rare. | | |
| ▲ | Zak 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The commercial value of a ten year old smartphone in a wealthy country is approximately $0. It's probably not terribly hard for a determined child who goes to school and has friends to obtain one. | | |
| ▲ | johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | And I bet I'd struggle to install almost all modern popular apps on a 10 year old phone. No Youtube, no Roblox, etc. They simply wouldn't update nor connect. That's one problem solved by the fact that phones operate on a deprecation model, as opposed to Windows OS. | | |
| ▲ | epihelix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm writing this on a seven year old phone (an S10e), running a community ROM with A15, and I have no issues at all in installing any apps. This device is my daily driver (it has a headphone jack and SD card support, and a relatively easily replaceable battery, and is small and light - so it's better than most modern flagships for my needs). A pixel would have much better community ROM support still. These old flagship phones are still plenty powerful for anything other than (useless) on device AI or intense 3D gaming. There is only a "depreciation" model if you don't unlock your bootloader - and even then, a seven year support cycle makes it very easy to obtain cheap, old, fully supported phones, if that's your jam. | | |
| ▲ | johnnyanmac 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >There is only a "depreciation" model if you don't unlock your bootloader That's fair. I also think most kids won't know how to unlock a bootloader (and if Google has its way, that won't be an option anyway). > a seven year support cycle makes it very easy to obtain cheap, old, fully supported phones, if that's your jam. Is that iphone support? I think only the biggest flagships get 7 years of official support (and can maybe run 2-3 more years before app version itself out, without external intervention). From what I saw, most budget phones are lucky to get 5 years of support, and will break down well before than anyways. |
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| ▲ | Zak 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That may be, but quite a few of the things that people want to keep kids out of are entirely usable from a browser. |
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| ▲ | mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In real life, it doesn't work like this for most people. In real life, kids want something and either the parents agree to buy that and then they no longer bother with that device or the kid saves its money trades something and get that device. The idea that a kid gets an expensive device that can't buy by itself and the parents have control or what device the kid gets is a very middle-class assumption. Life isn't that perfect for most people. | | |
| ▲ | johnnyanmac 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | With all due respect, this just sounds like justification for lazy parenting. We're 2 generations into the digital era: parents of such an era should have enough digital literacy to make sure their kids do not get in danger. Let's use another analog: Kids want sweets and parents either agree to buy that and no longer bother with their diet, or saves money to go to the candy store. Yet if a kid gets too unhealthy we (IMO, rightfully) have CPS sent to their house to investigate their home life. Kids were never meant to be a convenience. And parents talked about here aren't rich enough to delegate their parenting off to someone else. Take a few hours to research what you give to your kid and monitor what they might get outside of your vision. | | |
| ▲ | subscribed 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's okay that it doesn't match your experience but it's also a case that you shouldn't extrapolate your expectations and experience onto others. There's plenty of overworked, stressed or ignorant parents who really wish they could care or they don't at all. "should have enough digital literacy" doesn't survive reality check - reportedly 12-26% adults in the UK (% depending on the country) is reported to have very poor/lack of basic literacy skills. 25% approximately are functionally illiterate. Reportedly (I'm not an American), 36 million of US adults are functionally illiterate; 43% cannot read a simple job application; 41% of low-income households lack digital literacy skills. Those are only two prominent examples. More developed countries (especially in Europe) will fare better, many countries will fare much worse. I think your heart is in the right place but the reality stays in disagreement. | | |
| ▲ | johnnyanmac 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe it's a cultural issue here, but my country is very resistant to the government coming in to course correct how people live their lives. Many times to its detriment (diet, guns, social media), but the boon of this is that it makes it really hard for anyone to incorporate a surveillance state. "Those who sacrifice freedom for security..." And all that. The sad fact is many kids are already falling under the cracks. Failing to mind their kids internet usage is just one way, and having companies sneak in to try and fix this patch won't suddenly lead to success. The needle won't be moved in terms of progress, but privacy will take a near fatal blow. I fail to see why we should accept such measures when this is just yet another bald face power grab by greedy corporations. I might have been more accommodating if this was in good faith, but we've been past the BOTD for at least 7 years now. |
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| ▲ | mrguyorama 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Walmart has sold android smartphones of okay functionality that poor people depend on for decades. Like, less than $100. Nowadays they have $20 ones that are locked to pay as you go monthly purchases, which is definitely worse than the old tracfone days but about the same price if you had to top up every month anyway. That's ignoring used phones. Even poor kids get christmas money sometimes. |
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| ▲ | vorpalhex 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a parent issue, the same as if their kid has a secret stash of cocaine or enjoys dancing in traffic. No technical measure can fix stupid. | | |
| ▲ | sharperguy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No obviously we can just require that drug dealers make sure they distribute cocaine in packets that only open for adults. | | | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's not parents issue. That's why we go after people who sell or give drugs to kids. Is a serious offense, we don't wave our hands and say its parents problem and not drugging kids is a popular policy unlike drug enforcement for adults. | | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, but that assumes, that there are people out there, selling smartphones to children at scale. First the price for one is way to large for the financial budget of a child, and second that gets even more price-intensive, after the first one got confiscated by the parent. | | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are literally people out there selling smartphones to children at scale. A smartphone these days can be bought for as cheap as a burger because 2nd hand market exist and its not limited to iPhones. | | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | And the child can also go and buy a porn magazin, which is likely to be eventually found by the parent, just like the burner phone you suggest. The former is also going to be cheaper. | | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Guess what they check before they sell the kid a porn magazine | | |
| ▲ | johnnyanmac 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | So you're suggesting resellers require ID's to sell smartphones? I completely agree. Not much difference between a porn magazine and a portal to infinite porn magazines. |
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| ▲ | vorpalhex 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Everything is a parents issue. If you are depending on the police to keep your kid from doing drugs, you have failed as a parent. I promise you, your kid can locate drugs better than the cops can arrest low level dealers. You as a parent need to teach your kid how to behave (mostly through things like teaching ethics and morals) not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18. And yes, I am a parent of multiple kids. | | |
| ▲ | mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree, however the problem is that large number of parents can't do that and it becomes a societal issue. That's why we are talking about that, otherwise it would have been private family issue. Drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy and now social media has become societal issue as enough parents failed to control their kids actions or development. | | | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18. And in addition, such an approach, will not lead to a child magically becoming an adult all of a sudden when they turn 18. | |
| ▲ | kelseyfrog 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If we want parental behavior to change, we have to change the incentives. Parents must be held criminally liable for exposing their children to social media. Until we change the incentives, 'parents need to parent' is just an empty slogan. |
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| ▲ | mindslight 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So sure, we go after anybody who gives or sells devices without basic parental controls directly to kids. So you need to be 18 to buy a phone, which we're 90% of the way to anyway with the way credit cards work. The fundamental point is that the Internet is not a daycare. All of these attempts to put the burden on sites boil down to changing this dynamic, recasting the Internet as if it should be appropriate to use as a daycare. Today it's big tech and porn. Tomorrow it's any writing that the the religious reich dislikes. Monday it's technical sites as they can help kids bypass restrictions. Tuesday it's international sites being blocked at the ISP-level because they don't bother with any of this crap. We also need to remember the context here, lest we carry water for big tech's continued abuse. The main reason the surveillance industry is reaching for age verification (ie identity verification) is that harm to children is so far the only regulatory cause of action that has been found to stick. Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. Where what we actually need is to stop their abuse for adults as well - eg data privacy, anti-trust regulation to open up their services to competing clients, and at this point probably straight up regulation of purposely-addictive "algorithmic" feeds. | | |
| ▲ | Mezzie 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigate the Internet and who are legally on the hook for everything they do. OnlyFans, likewise, is going to work out great! Now the 17 year old girls turning 18 won't have access to things like the social media of former OF performers or access to any communities where sex workers discuss the downsides of their job or how to stay safe. Have to protect the children, don't you know. That way they can be perfectly pure and innocent when they turn 18 and are ready to be exploited. Like fattening up cattle. | | |
| ▲ | mindslight 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes! And this dovetails into a point I really should have made as well. The thing about "age verification" (ie identity verification) is that it puts the decision of what kids should access wholly in the hands of corporate attorneys. For example we can easily imagine a "Facebook4Kidz" website that has many of the same terrible dynamics as regular Faceboot, but that Faceboot's attorneys can justify as being legally compliant. As a parent, you would really want to block this too - while all of these proposals for identity verification and site-based-control claim to solve the problem but leave you with no way to do that! This ties into your comment because as a kid approaches adulthood, as a parent you also want to loosen those restrictions so that they can develop these skills - gradually while under your supervision. Whereas the corporate attorneys will just say that they're strictly off limits, right up until it's then open season as you're pointing out. | | |
| ▲ | Mezzie 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes! And you want them to learn in a situation where the stakes are lower: at 18, someone can put themselves into a ton of debt or put nudes in the wrong place and just nuke their life in a way that they can't fix for a decade and everyone shrugs and is like 'you're a grown up!' Think of all the kids who back in the day got scammed out of their Neopoints, or lost all of their in game currency in GTA, etc. That's a way, way better way to learn about account security and who to trust than their first experience with scammers involving real money. Is the problem that we're exploiting kids, or is the problem that we're exploiting people? We're not going to be able to protect kids from exploitation in a society/culture that explicitly condones exploitation. If we think exploiting people is fine, actually, as long as they're over 18, then your kids will never be safe, because they will grow up. Even setting aside the obvious examples I listed, binge drinking used to be a huge problem amongst college aged kids. Who's to say that the Internet/social media wouldn't be similar? How many kids are going to flunk out of school because they can't stop watching digital crack and now mom and dad aren't around to stop them? And unlike binge drinking, your body won't eventually revolt against you, and with the addiction consultants The Machine employs, there will always be new content. People grow out of binge drinking because eventually it grows stale and hangovers when you're 35 are far worse than ones when you're 21, but that's not true of social media use. To tie this to other issues, we're already seeing issues with relationship and family formation amongst young people. I'm not sure flash banging them with addictive content when they're in their prime years is the call. If all it took for the Internet to be healthy was holding off until adulthood, we'd expect people who were adults when they started to have a healthy relationship with social media. They very much do not. |
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| ▲ | jolmg 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control? Because the devices they're given by their parents should be administered by their parents. The minors wouldn't have administrative control over their devices at all. > You want to use your friends Wi-Fi? Now that requires full identification so that we know that its not some kid The device wouldn't care how the connection to the internet is made. It ultimately obeys the parents' settings. The Wi-Fi doesn't need to care either way. > You are just moving the verification point to another gate, it means that no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet because we want to allow parents to control their kids. Not at all. This wouldn't affect people without parental controls on their device at all. They'd be able to have anonymous connections as they do now. The only difference from the server-side is adding some special path /.well-known/parental-info.json or an HTTP header to responses that would indicate what's on the page from a parental perspective, so the device can make a decision whether to display based on its parental settings. |
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| ▲ | newsoftheday 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control? YouTube doesn't, the parent does. > no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet Adults would not be blocked if I understand the GP comment. It's an age recommendation and it's up to the parent's to control it for their kids. > we want to allow parents to control their kids. Yes. Google, YouTube, AI in general will never be a replacement for parenting and they should drop the charade now. |
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| ▲ | wowyouredumb 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control? Because the parent is there to parent them? Somehow I (and presumably almost everyone here) grew up with unfettered access to the Internet until now. Your kid isn't my kid, and someone relying on a computer to parent their children shouldn't ruin computers for everyone. |
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| ▲ | patmorgan23 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| "how do you enforce that kids connection always goes to the parents" That's the thing. You don't. It's the parents job to monitor how their children use the Internet. |
